02/28/2018

Appeal of 3-Day Ban for "Encroachment" Workaround of Bad Linden Road on Grounds of Selective and Excessive Prosecution

Dear Lindens,

Re: 219305Re: 218861

I'd like to appeal the 3-day suspension from Second Life sent to me February 27, 2018 on charges of "encroachment" as it is excessive and is selective prosecution.

Last week, an avatar named "animats Resident" complained to me that my parking lots in Grote were encroaching, and accused me of being the cause of his motorcycle crash and ordered me to remove my encroaching prims. This seemed odd -- why this avatar at this time, at a site where I had never had this complaint? Out of all the roads in SL -- many of which suffer the problems described? Is he a Linden alt?

More to the point, my parking lots encroached only slightly on a Linden road shoulder, and only because the Linden landscaping and road construction there are so terrible that it is impossible to drive out of my land on to the road. I have multiple tenants there with vehicles (it is a camp and RV park) and it is unfair that I pay tier, and they pay rent, and we cannot reach the Linden road due to physical obstacles in the form of lumpy terraforming, cracked roads (prim drift), and strange clumps of rocks.

Inworld, I denied that my build was the problem, and animats "took it to the forums," not mentioning me by name, but putting a hostile post here: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/418728-encroachment-on-robin-loop/

(This is one of a number of sly harassment posts directed at land owners that aminats imagines interfere with his aspirations to run the platform at some level himself.)

Was it a coincidence that animat's attack on me came at the same time as multiple grotesque attacks on me by a series of griefer alts impersonating me with racist spam, causing hundreds of people to lob angry protests at me and spam *me*? Possibly, except a griefer with a similar name of one of the alts who was banned by LL wrote to me that he was now ARing me for "encroachment". That, too, could be merely copycat harassment drawn from the forums, but the point is that a chorus of harassment of me on this sim, one of my key communities has been going on for weeks (and some elements have gone on for years) and it may not be coincidental.

On the forums, there was the usual pile-on, with Linden fans accusing me of "theft" and "encroachment" -- something that LL itself had not done for the three long years that I have had that property and that "encroachment" -- again, amounting to some ramps over very small portions of the Linden shoulder to get over immoveable bumps, cracks, and rocks on to the road.

So next, I log on and find that two parking lots are returned, not surprising, given the avid campaign run by animats and the "winkler" griefer and forums fans. I put them back out, but was careful to pull them back from the Linden land. I even struggled for an hour with one tenant who was trying to drive his truck out of the lot to find a way to put my ramp but not encroach on Linden land. It wasn't possible, but I left the two parking lots not on Linden land, and the tenant just moved his car out on to the road in a series of increment steps and struggles.

As far as I know the southern parking lot was not on Linden land, I pulled it up and back multiple times, struggling with bouncing prims and terraforming issues.

The next thing I know, I am logged off, and given a 3-day ban. I then discover that my northern parking lot is in place, but the southern one is returned. Furthermore, a garage that had not been returned previously when Lindens hurried to this location after multiple hostile ARs -- which had been there for 3 years -- was also now returned for "encroachment" -- also a matter of small amounts of land on the road shoulder and also merely due to the impossibility of driving on this Linden road on and off my property. There is no other reason.

It's a very simple problem, one that had a workaround, and had no Linden intervention for 3 years. That suddenly residents began to AR this, put a hostile post on the forums, is either coincidence or part of a concerted provocation and grief campaign, but the result is a draconian sentence based on a mistaken belief of "recidivist encroachment".

Worse, this harsh 3-day ban came AFTER I wrote a ticket with multiple updates about the actual poor state of the Linden road (no. 28861). Note: there is a separate ticket, 219305, which I thought was merely an update to 28861 but appears as a separate ticket.

So I filed a number of updates to Ticket No. 28861, including the very salient fact that Jaquix Linden claimed on the forums here: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/418728-encroachment-on-robin-loop/ that Governance (?! They fix roads now?!) had completely fixed the road, smoothing the land and rocks. This was simply not true. All that happened first was that they shifted the invisiprim owned by Ben Linden placed 12 years ago, which was ostensibly the reason for the motorcycle crash. Naturally those of us who actually live and work in this sim, as distinct from outside agitators with agendas, have seen numerous real avatars with vehicles and even more driverless spam cars go over this obviously broken road with no problems. The real victims of the broken road are those who cannot drive on and off it!

Surely Lindens could see if I pulled my parking lots back, even if they somehow found one to still be in "violation" and suddenly noticed a garage ramp, too, they could merely ask me to move the prims AND answer my ticket about the broken road still not fixed -- which would REMOVE the need to encroach at all, you know? As a workaround.

When last I checked, after multiple rounds on my ticket, the southern parking lot area was smoothed but not the northern. Lindens are not fixing this from the perspective of actual drivers who need to actually drive out on their road, but only from their own perspective of needing to fix some motorcyclist's problem.

Clearly the 3-day suspension is thus a) punishment for a belief in "belligerence" which is not sustained by the facts b) also punishment for even filing a ticket about a broken road. Indeed, when I asked several other people to file tickets on this, who were affected directly, some were afraid. Another landlord told me that she feared EVER filing a ticket on broken roads BECAUSE IT LEADS TO THIS: SELECTIVE AND HARSH PUNISHMENT.

And there is a good reason for her fears and those of other owners: although, for example, there was nothing wrong with the bridge and road in Palomarian that any of us could see, it was a completely fine old Linden stone bridge that fit with the picturesque builds in the area, road Moles inexplicably dug up the entire thing, put in black-tar mesh roads like Zindra that seem to come from outer space, and a bridge that is also some black mesh horror that has no beauty nor does it fit with the site. This simply boggles the mind. While we all appreciate overall what the Moles are doing on the roads on the moth continent, these kinds of odd incidents are just too much of a problem -- and there is never any consultation with anyone who has actually bought land, pays tier, and put a build on their land. That's wrong.

Lindens dislike governance -- it's time consuming, it's contentious, they don't have staff. So they are fixing it with draconian "governance" of 3-day bans, which harm a person's business, make it impossible for their customers to reach them and so on. Why? To satisfy some creepy faction of griefers and their enablers with spam cars, hatred of landlords, railroad freaks?

Animats has an agenda to create a driverless car fleet to go around and collect "road repair" data and is scripting various vehicles that he claims have debugged sim crossings. We're skeptical. And we don't need one more spam fleet degrading our experience with empty cars that DO NOT have tourists in it despite claims, that are out of theme (buses in the air, boats on the water, trains on the road) and crash off road sometimes lagging up sims. Why? These ambitious "helpers of humankind" could work with the Lindens to put these tour cars at infohubs where people could take them on demand so that they don't spam up the roads and blight others' experience who PAY TIER.

Finally, I'll mention another problem on Grote that contributes to the reluctance to me and my tenants to file tickets about changing Linden land. For one, we know that generally Lindens don't like to do this on request. If they answered one of these requests, they might find themselves deluged. While they themselves don't mind ripping up perfectly good bridges, if any tenant suggests one isn't to standard they won't respond. Second, on this sim, Michael Linden, former head of the Moles, had started building a railroad on a Linden Right of Way that is actually the old rail bed of a *resident-run* railroad called WARR that *blighted this sim for years with high-rise rails, ruining the view of the pond*. Given that I myself sold land to this project, named WARR, and gave right-of-way to WARR on my sims in that area for free, it was super annoying to be gifted with that ugly high rail that made several of my parcels under or near it unrentable, and forced me to abandon them.

WARR then abandoned their own land. The Lindens re-sold some of it on the auction, someone bought it, and I bought it from them. Lindens say this was a mistake, and I was also accused falsely by their fans of somehow having gained this land through some "special favor," but I bought it at a high price from a flipper completely normally and legally as the Lindens themselves auctioned it. As they should have auctioned the rest of their "Linden Right of Way". First, the fanboyz agitated me for months, inworld and in forums, trying to get me to sell my land. For the life of me, I could not understand, in a world FILLED with railroads, I needed to yield to makers of blight devaluing my land. I love railroads and have land near them on at least 4 sims, and provide free rail cars and rez areas. Why should I *also* have to lose value of my pond land by yet ANOTHER RR? None of it makes sense. Development in real life has input from communities and has sense -- it is driven by a bunch of hoboes who themselves don't pay tier, and abandoned their land. Evola Courtois maintains a grief notecard with false statements about me on his land in Sikkima; he also maintains a grief parcel on Grote with a toilet and a sack of garbage and flies to heckle me and my tenants. This is normal? Of course not. These are furries with an agenda to harass and grief others until they yield. I won't be doing that.

Michael Linden literally stopped his railroad just shy of my land because he only had two choices then: dig up Linden road; build a high-rise over Linden road which we would all protest; simply build over my land by seizing it back. He was then let go by the Lab, and his fans kept pestering me. It just boggles the mind. There the matter was stalled -- as it should be -- and Michael Linden's train and tracks taken up -- but I still get harassed by hoboes who want yet another railroad.

It's *okay* not to have railroads everywhere; it's okay to have a railroad END in Electra and if Lindens must have a RR, they have a zillion other abandoned land sims to choose from without harassing me and my tenants with yet another RR.

To be sure, Lindens imposing a 3-day ban may believe they "must" do this with a "second" violation but they really need to look at the context here and act wisely to avoid creating conflict drivers themselves and to make some reasonable accommodation to residents who in fact only had to seek workarounds to their neglect.

So once again my appeal to you is as follows in a complex situation

1. Linden Lab did not act for 3 years on "encroaching prims" and had no abuse reports about them such as to be forced into action. That suggests they were a very minor issue.2. Indeed, encroachment was minor, on a road shoulder extending only some 32 m, and did not block the road -- and were ONLY there as a WORKAROUND to a bad, impassable Linden road.3. The prims were moved back in good faith after the first warning; if one still inadvertently encroached or not all of them were moved a simple IM or message via support could have accomplished the adjustment of the rest -- especially as a road repair ticket was filed!4. A situation of multiple actors griefing me on these sims must be seen as the context -- railroad hobos with an agenda to drive me and my tenants off the land to put in a needless railroad; a driverless car freak with a "repair" agenda that have picked only this sim for an odd reason who has also harassed me on the forums without himself being the subject to any disciplinary action, although taking of grievances to the forums is supposed to be an offense (and indeed, my *self-defense* in this thread, as always, then became a subject of a forums warning *to me,* while the original poster with a harassment agenda was let off scott-free. And finally griefers who have harassed me for years, spamming groups with racist messages claiming they are "bots" who are "owned by me". (I have no bots; LL knows these accounts are not mind and have banned them) But why do Lindens allow this? Everyone knows where these griefers are now based again (Winterfell, Kuula, Learning Island 3).5. LL does not need a railroad here; it can fix a road in 20 minutes without persecuting the person who tried to work around it; it should heed people who pay tier and try to develop areas for public use which are actually enjoyed, instead of catering to small factions that don't own land, or own only a token parcel, but have "big plans" for the whole platform where they don't live, but we do.

I'm long familiar with the attitude quite a few Lindens take to us, one of mocking and contempt that people take virtuality seriously and construct homes and lives in it -- they always behave as "meta" platformists and that's understandable. I can only remind them who pays the bills here.

Comments

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Don't EVER come to OUR sim again with your spam. You have been warned, duly, by two administrators, yet you continue spamming. You even continue spamming in spite of currently being banned(!) from Second Life on your main account as you said yourself (due to spamming no doubt). We will report you until all your accounts are banned permanently from Second Life, and Ravenglass Rentals has been permanently removed.

I'm amazed that you'd "warn" an idiot griefer like this. Huh? You should immediately ban the bot and report it to the Lindens. It will be removed like the last 2 dozen. Yes, they spawn new ones but eventually the Lindens kill them off.

Ravenglass Rentals is not going to be removed at all because my company has not done anything wrong. You have.